The Yard Boy
by ChainOfPaperclips
Summary: Emma sees Killian doing yard work while driving home from her job one day, and can't resist the compulsion to stop and ask him about it-with results that neither of them expect. One-shot fic. Rated M for non-explicit sex. "Feels"-heavy. Mild Princess Bride allusions.


** A/N: Here's a one-shot fic that I hope everyone will enjoy as I continue to work on the next chapter of A Man of Honor. I got the idea while I was thinking of CS while doing my own yard work one afternoon. I think it turned out far better than I even expected, so hopefully you will find this as fun and sweet and entertaining as I did while I wrote it****. **

Emma Swan removed her red jacket from the coat rack that stood just inside the door of her office at the Sheriff's Department. Pulling her arms through the sleeves, she shrugged the coat onto her shoulders and pulled her blonde curls free from the collar. "All right, well, I'm heading out," she told David with a wave.

"Enjoy your day off tomorrow," he smiled. "If you need help unpacking anything-"

"I'll call," she promised with a smile. "But I really don't have much left. Mary-Margaret already unpacked and put most my stuff away while I was at work yesterday."

"You did give her a key," he laughed.

"I know. I just...I didn't expect her to be this enthusiastic about it. Me moving out and getting my own house, I mean."

"Well," David said, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms, "she's just trying to be helpful and supportive, I think. She does miss you already, I can tell you that much." He smiled again. "Although, the privacy has its benefits, too."

"Ick!" She held up a hand. "I get it. Mixed feelings from the parents. Just...no details, okay? I'll see you and Mary-Margaret for dinner tomorrow night."

"Seven 'o clock," he reminded her.

She waved at him in acknowledgement and left the sheriff's station, feeling elated and overwhelmed at the prospect of a day off from work. A day off which, as far as she knew, would not be spent trying to save the world from another horrible villain or a sudden, terrible crisis. Just a normal day in which she could relax with a good book, she thought, closing the door to her car. Or catch up on her favorite TV shows, she mused, starting her car. They had started to pile up in large numbers on her DVR, and if she didn't watch some of them soon, they might be deleted before she had a chance.

Emma turned out of the parking lot and drove in the direction of her new home, the late afternoon sun at her back. She turned up the radio to hear it better over the air conditioner that she had cranked up to full blast. She felt good. So good, she was even tempted to sing along with the radio.

_Well, what the hell?_ she thought with a careless shrug. Turning a corner, she drove past Granny's, singing under her breath, and waved to Hook, who was doing yard work across the street from the diner.

_What the hell?_ she thought with a very different attitude. She slammed on her brakes, and the car screeched to a stop. Parking it properly, she peered into her rearview mirror and she saw that in fact her eyes had _not _deceived her. It actually was Hook! Dressed in a long-sleeved white t-shirt and a pair of ragged jeans, he stood on the sidewalk holding a trimmer in one hand, and the hook of his other hand looped through its handle. Sweat soaked a large portion of the shirt, indicating that he had been working for a while.

"Is he trimming the _lawn_?" she gaped in disbelief. This could not be happening. It had to be an illusion. And if it wasn't an illusion, she decided, getting out of her car, she had to go witness in detail for herself. Slamming her car door shut, she crossed the street, determined to get answers.

"Hello, love," he greeted her, with his back to her. "Can I do something for you?"

"Yeah," she said, "you can tell me just what the hell it is that you're doing."

He turned, the beginnings of a smile upon his face. "Never done yard work, lass?"

"Of course I've done yard work! Why the hell are _you_ doing it? You didn't even know how to work a stapler a few weeks ago!"

He shrugged, turning his attention back to his work. Trimming more of the grass along the edge of the lawn, he spoke again over the loud motor, "I needed the work."

"Work? What happened to the job I got you three weeks ago?"

He shrugged again, looking away guiltily.

Her eyes narrowed. "You got fired, didn't you?"

"No."

"Then why are you doing this?" she gestured to the clippings on the sidewalk.

"Because it wasn't enough."

"Not enough money?" She frowned, considering this. Emma had no idea what the pirate's typical spending habits were, but she supposed it wasn't unreasonable that he might want more money than what he could earn doing odd clerical jobs at Archie's office. "I'm sure Archie would be open to giving you a raise once you've been there a while longer-"

He turned toward her again, grinning. "It's not the money, lass."

"I don't understand."

He finished trimming around the mailbox and turned the machine off before he answered again. "A man needs to sweat now and then to be happy, love."

The scent of fresh lawn clippings and male perspiration filled her nostrils. Suddenly aware that they were standing just inches apart from each other, she backed away."Not a lot of, ah, sweat to be had at a desk job, huh?" she managed breathlessly, not quite able to take her eyes off of him. His sweat-soaked shirt defined sets of muscles she had never noticed under the layers of his pirate uniform. She wondered if they were as hard as they looked, then mentally slapped herself for it. _Get a grip, Emma!_ _It's not like you've never seen a sweaty man before__!_

Hook's eyes gleamed, as if he suspected the direction her thoughts had taken.

"Not nearly enough," he smirked, setting the trimmer down in the grass. "And as I haven't the opportunity for more preferable ways of working up a sweat..."

"Oh, poor pirate," she teased, trying to mask the impulse to place her hands on either side of his face and kiss him into insensibility, "that you have to resort to lawn work instead." He laughed, wiping the beads of sweat off of his face with the crook of his good arm. Her heart began to beat erratically, and the breath whooshed out of her lungs. At that moment, she wanted him bad. So bad, she wanted to take him right there on the sidewalk in broad daylight, for God and all the world to see.

Swallowing with difficulty, Emma glanced away and crossed her arms to prevent just such a loss of self-control. "So whose lawn is this? It can't be yours, you've hardly been working a month. And who taught you about all the machinery?"

"Well, I don't know that I rightly recall his name, but it's that doctor fellow from the hospital, the one who-"

"Dr. Whale?"

"That's the one. That lass Ruby suggested this job when I was at the diner for lunch last week. She said Whale's been very busy picking up extra shifts at the hospital after one of the other doctors quit, and he hasn't had time to care for his lawn properly."

"And she just suggested this to you out of the blue?" Emma inquired with a healthy amount of skepticism. "I didn't realize you and Ruby were so close."

"We're not," he said, looking at her sidelong as he bent to pick up the trimmer again. Emma tilted her head, checking out his ass and admiring the way the fabric of his jeans smoothed out tightly over the curve of his bottom when he bent over. _God, what are you doing?_ she chastised herself when she realized she was looking. And yet, she was unable to look away until Killian straightened and swung around, catching her in the act.

She flushed and looked away guiltily. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the smug, knowing expression that formed on his face. "You were complaining again, weren't you?" she accused, without the exasperation she usually felt. "About your job."

"I prefer to think of it as sharing tales from my period of adjustment," he retorted.

"Well, whatever you call it, who taught you to work the lawn mower and the trimmer and all of this?" She waved her arm, gesturing to the trailer of equipment parked by the curb of Dr. Whale's front lawn. "You can't even drive. Who hauled all of this here for you?"

"David showed me," he said, looking away as he loaded the trimmer into the trailer. "The equipment is Whale's."

"David?" she echoed. "As in my father, David?"

"That's the one."

"Let me guess...Ruby suggested it."

"Right again."

Her eyes narrowed. Ruby had become entirely too...too...damned perceptive, she decided. Or maybe it wasn't that she had become perceptive, but merely that she had recovered her other senses. _Damned wolf-nose_, Emma thought, remembering how Ruby had scented the pheromones flying between her and Hook at the celebration dinner after they had returned from Neverland with Henry.

She'd been trying to convince Emma to make a move ever since. But it seemed now that Ruby had escalated into engineering events herself, in the hopes that Emma might finally act on her attraction to the pirate. An attraction that scared Emma because she suspected it might run much deeper than the desire to merely bed him, no matter what she had told Ruby.

"And...David didn't think that was weird at all, you wanting to learn how to mow lawns?"

"Perhaps," he shrugged, "but your father recognizes I have to earn my stripes the same as anyone else, if I'm to be accepted around here. This certainly can't hurt that effort."

"I see." And she did, sort of._ Wel_l, she thought after an awkward silence when she realized she had nothing left to say,_ may as well leave him to i_t. She opened her mouth to say something to that effect, but the words that tumbled out of her mouth next horrified her in their sudden shift from sarcastic to flirtatious. "Next time you need help, yard boy, come see me first. I could help you get your motor started."

His head jerked up. The expression in his eyes was something between shocked and cautiously hopeful.

_What the hell am I doing?_ she panicked to herself. _I'm using cheesy pick up lines now? What is wrong with you, Emma?_ Then, backpedaling out of sheer nerves, she thought, _Play it cool. He's from a different time. He wouldn't know a modern pick up line from a hole in the ground, right? Maybe he won't realize what you meant._

But she hadn't counted on the fact that, modern pick up lines and differing time periods aside, the language of flirtation was universal. And Hook had mastered it.

"Is that so, Swan?" he recovered with a knowing smirk. "Well, I'm free in about twenty minutes, as soon as Ruby comes by to store the equipment again." He winked. "No need to wait so long."

She stared at him, prepared to turn him away again rather than risk heartbreak, but there was a small splinter of herself that suspected this might be her only chance. If she pushed him away this time, she might never be able to let anyone in, never be capable of finding what her parents had with each other. And that thought scared her far more than a one night stand with Hook.

"Okay." She gave him directions to her new house and left before she started to talk herself out of it for a third time. Slamming the door of her car, she gripped the steering wheel and stared at the road in front of her, dazed. "I have a date," she said to herself. "With Captain-Freaking-Hook." Shaking her head at the complicated and weird tangle her life had become, she put on her seatbelt and started the ignition. "Thanks a lot, Mom and Dad," she muttered.

By the time she arrived at her house five minutes later, she had entered full panic mode. _Smart, Emma,_ she thought to herself as she ran up the porch steps and jammed her key into the front door lock. _Invite a guy over to your new house where you can't find anything._ How in the hell was she supposed to get ready before he arrived, if she had to search for every little thing her mother had unpacked for her?

She stumbled in the front door and kicked off her shoes in a corner before she raced past the living room and down the short hallway to her bedroom. Flinging the door open, she made a beeline for her closet. What did you wear for a fling with a pirate captain? She flicked through several dresses, muttering to herself, "Too formal, too desperate, too frumpy for sex...ugh, too depressing! It's not a funeral, Emma!" she said, pushing aside a black skirt suit. She eyed the skin tight pink mini dress she had worn to a "date" the night Henry had knocked on her door. Although she had no doubt Hook would appreciate the tiny dress immensely, the associations she had with it made her balk. "No thank you," she muttered, turning away from her closet altogether. Much as she loved her son, the last thing she needed in her life right now was another kid. Better not to tempt fate.

She walked over to the dresser and opened one of the middle drawers, rifling through it. Perhaps a dress was the wrong way to go, she thought, inspired by a sudden idea. She found the shirt she sought at the bottom of the drawer, tucked almost out of sight. Emma held it up, considering it. She had not worn it in ages. Pulling her other shirt off, she tossed it in the laundry basket and slipped her arms into the mid-length sleeves, buttoning the front from hem to collarbone. Slipping out of her pants, she put that in the basket, too, and opened the bottom drawer of her dresser. Retrieving a pair of shorts, she pulled them on and fastened them before she turned to gaze at herself in the mirror.

"Not bad," she said, surveying the outfit. The shirt hugged her curves without being skin-tight, and the red and white pattern of the plaid seemed to bring out the blondeness of her hair, which cascaded over the breast pockets of the shirt. A pair of neat, black shorts peeked out from under the hem of the shirt, hugging her bottom and hips in all the right places. It was an outfit, she reflected, that David would never have let her wear out of the house, if he'd been present while she was growing up. Suggestive, but not trampy. She wouldn't be overdressed compared to Hook, wearing this.

Satisfied, she set about tidying the room, shoving discarded boxes that she hadn't yet recycled into the closet, and hiding piles of paper work from the office that she had brought home with her yesterday. She'd just managed to tug the bedspread back toward the pillows when a knock sounded on her front door. Nervous, she gave each of the pillows a brief plump and walked across the house to answer the door.

"Hello, love," Hook said, leaning through the door frame to give her a kiss.

"Come in," she said, flustered by the thought of the gossip that might spread if her neighbors had seen such a greeting.

He ducked past her and wandered through the house as she shut the front door. Gazing at his surroundings with open curiosity, it was several moments before he spoke to her again. "Nice place, love."

"Thanks, I-uh..." She slipped her hands into the back pockets of her shorts."Well, now that you're here, we, um, could watch a movie, or-"

"Swan," he interrupted, "we both know why I'm here. If you are having second thoughts, now is the time to tell me."

"No," she surprised herself by saying. "No second thoughts."

He stepped close then, and Emma felt the heat radiating between them as they stood mere inches apart. "Good. I've waited a bloody long time for this."

Emma's eyes widened, and she opened her mouth to form some properly sarcastic reply to his arrogance, but he lowered his mouth to hers and took advantage of the openness of it to send her heart racing as his tongue slid across hers with familiarity. They had only kissed once before, back in Neverland, but it had been a desperate, challenging kiss-and over almost as soon as she had started it. This one was nothing of the sort. Killian took his time, savoring every movement, every meeting of lips and tongue, with a sensual tenderness that surprised her. She had not imagined the pirate as a particularly romantic sort, even after his declaration of love in the echo cave of Neverland. Certainly, he had not given her any indication since their return to Storybrooke that his feelings were unchanged, that he desired her for herself rather than to simply get in her pants for sexual release.

Until now.

"Bed," she gasped after he finally broke the kiss. "Bed. I-I have one. A bed. It's in the other room. My bed. In the bed room," she said, cringing inwardly at the clumsy words that poured out of her mouth. _God, how does he do this to me?_ she thought. How did one man manage to make her fall apart and act like a nervous, inexperienced teenager?

Killian seemed to sense the direction of her thoughts, for he brushed a lock of her hair back and kissed her softly behind the ear. "No need to be nervous, love." He grinned. "Though I must say, that shade of red on your cheeks is rather becoming."

Horrified, Emma put a hand to her cheek before she could stop herself. "It's-I put blush on before you came over," she stammered. "You know, make up."

"Mmm," he said, tilting his head as if he were not quite convinced. "Let's call that bluff and see if the rest of you blushes the same shade before I'm done," he declared, scooping her up into his arms. He carried her to the bedroom and laid her down on freshly made bed, careful not to tangle his hook in her hair. He released her with another kiss and straightened, lifting the hem of his shirt to remove it.

Emma struggled to sit up. "Let me."

He paused, issuing her an arch look. "As the lady wishes," he murmured, dropping his hands to his sides. "Never let it be said I'm not gentleman enough to let a lady have her way with me."

"Shut up," she smiled, as she slowly lifted the hem of his sweaty shirt. He jerked with surprise, inhaling with an audible hiss as she slid her fingers over his chest. Planting kisses in a slow trail from his navel to his pecs, she lifted the shirt off of him. It rumpled his hair, and she reached out to smooth it down, surprising them both. She froze a moment, her heart racing rapidly as she realized this was already spiraling out of her control-and they had barely begun. She should have known that it could never be a simple one night stand with him, no matter what she had told herself to avoid getting hurt. Whatever her initial intentions, Emma realized, she had made her decision between Neal and Hook. And there was no going back now, even if she wanted to.

He cupped her face with his good hand, drawing her to him with the other. She felt the cool metal of his hook settle against her waist, just above the waistband of her shorts. "Emma, darling," he murmured, "there's no need to be afraid."

"I can't help it," she whispered back. She had not let anyone in for such a long time that she found it difficult to actually let him in now that she wanted to. "I don't know how to take down the walls, Killian."

His expression softened. He pulled her closer, nesting their bodies against each other, and kissed her. Long and slow, it was a kiss filled with need that left her gasping for breath and struggling not to collapse in a pathetic heap on the bed when it ended. "Don't you know, love," he breathed into her ear, "pirates are excellent at scaling walls. If we can climb the rigging of a ship, we can climb almost anything."

_I should have known,_ she thought. _I should have known from the moment we climbed that beanstalk together._ If that hadn't foreshadowed their relationship with each other, she'd eat her own hat. She'd been screwed, so to speak, from the moment she met him. It seemed only fitting now that they consummate that relationship in a literal fashion.

"Something amuse you, darling?" he asked, pulling away slightly.

"No," she answered, trailing her fingers down the side of his face. "Just thinking of the beanstalk."

"Ah," he smirked, "I told you that you never forget your first. You won't forget this one, either."

"Shut up," she told him again, kissing him on the nose. "All of this talking kills the mood."

"Hmm," he leered, "then perhaps we're not doing the right sort of talking, darling."

She laughed despite herself, and they collapsed on the bed together, exploring each other with curiosity and wonder. True to his word, it wasn't long before the pirate had scaled her walls and exposed her vulnerability with more nakedness than her body. Shivering with pleasure as he stroked the curve of her bare breast, Emma knew with a certainty that she was entering dangerous territory, that her life would never be the same after this. Her life had never been simple, not when she was an unwanted foster child, or a pregnant women in jail, or even after she'd journeyed to Storybrooke and discovered her family. But the one area of life that _was_ simple-because she'd forced it to be, after Neal-was about to become as complicated as the rest of it. And that prospect both thrilled and terrified her.

"Cold?" he asked her. She shook her head, and he selected a spot along the curve of her jaw, administering hot, wet kisses. "Your skin tastes like honey," he murmured, trailing kisses down her shoulder. "What does the rest of you taste like, lass?"

A mischievous impulse took hold of her. She pushed him onto his back and chuckled. "Wouldn't you like to know?" she taunted in a sultry tone that would later surprise her upon remembering it.

"I most certainly would," he said unevenly, as she stroked the length of him through his boxer shorts.

She grinned. "Patience," she whispered in his ear, slipping her hand inside his underwear. "I thought you loved a challenge?"

He answered with a drawn out groan as her fingers continued their exploration. "Gods, Emma," he managed after a time, "you'll be the death of me."

"And will you die a happy man?" she asked with an arch look, slipping his shorts off.

"_Yes_," he gasped helplessly.

And just like that, her heart melted. She paused in her ministrations, shaken to her core. Breathing heavily, Hook sat up, kissing the top of her head.

"Something wrong, love?" he asked, wrapping his injured arm around her.

Emma gazed down at the cool, metal hook that rested against her ribcage. Frowning, she reached down and began to tug the sleeve off. "Why are you still wearing this?"

All at once, his bravado disappeared, and he tugged it back up in an insecure fashion, as if he were certain she might reject him if she saw the truth of what Rumplestiltskin had done to him three hundred years ago. "Emma, I can't-" he stuttered nervously, "Please don't."

She slipped her hand under his chin, lifting it. "Let me in, Killian," she whispered, meeting his gaze. He gave one short nod of assent, and she removed the sleeve without further protest. She trailed her finger tips across the skin, and he looked away quickly, as if he could not bear the sight of his damaged arm. Cradling the scarred stump where his hand had once been, she bent her head and gently kissed it.

He winced. "Lass, you don't have to-"

"Hey," she said with a harsh edge to her tone. Killian's head swiveled around. He stared at her in surprise. "You lost your hand trying to protect the woman you loved," she said in a much gentler tone. "That's a beautiful thing. You have nothing to be ashamed of, Killian. Don't hide it from me." She paused. "Or yourself," she pleaded.

He said nothing, but the expression in his eyes softened considerably, and though Killian tensed at first when she returned her attention to his left arm, before long she felt him relax, as if he'd found peace with his altered form for the first time in three hundred years. And though she wasn't quite certain, having given herself over to the heady sensations he had awakened in her once more, she thought she heard him murmur afterward, between kisses that trailed up her inner thigh, "Quite the pirate yourself, love."

Little talking was done after that, and they gave themselves over to each other completely. Whatever one night stand either of them might have intended had been abandoned. This was no mere testing of the waters to see where their feelings led them afterward. No hormone fueled outpouring of sexual release. It was, Emma sensed, the beginning of _forever_-whether either of them was ready to admit or not.

"Darling," Hook said as he leaned over her some time later, "are you ready?"

"Killian," she gasped between breaths, "after what you just did there, you should know the answer to that better than anybody on the block."

A devious, self-satisfied look bloomed on his face. He chuckled, kissing her softly on the lips. "Here we go, love," he murmured into her ear. He entered her slowly, almost hesitantly, as if, despite the evidence of her twelve year old son to the contrary, it were her first time. His eyes closed, and he choked back a sound that was something between a groan and a whimper as he slid into place. His eyes opened again a moment later as he shifted forward, establishing the rhythm that would carry them through to the end.

Emma moved in sync with him, the tension building in her body once again, coiling tighter and tighter. She slid her arms around his shoulders, clinging to him, and watched his expression gradually shift from controlled and full of concentration to one of utter defenselessness as he thrust one last time and moaned, reaching climax in unison with her.

He collapsed onto her afterward, his energy spent, and she inhaled the scent of him: rum and sweat and freshly cut grass. She smiled a little to herself. What a way to usher in her day of vacation tomorrow.

Her fingers moved through his hair, smoothing it as they had earlier, and he shifted at last, rolling off of her. Killian settled onto the pillow beside her and pulled a corner of the rumpled covers over himself. Emma rolled onto her side, curling her body close to his, and laid her head on his chest, soaking in the comfort that his presence always offered.

After a moment of hesitation, he laid his injured arm over her protectively.

"So," she said, feeling the need to fill the awkward silence that had descended between them, "better than mowing the lawn?"

"Marvelous, darling," he whispered, stroking her hair. Emma closed her eyes, reveling in the soothing sensation that it evoked. "Simply marvelous. Worth every minute of the three hundred year wait."

She sat up like a rocket. "Wait-what? Three _hundred _years?"

"Aye," he said soberly.

"But...I don't...What about Tinkerbell?" she suddenly accused.

He eyed her sidelong. "Jealous, love?"

"No," she lied, sliding down into the bed again. Then, unable to help herself, "There was really never anything between you? You really never had another woman between me and Milah?"

"Revenge consumed all my energy, love," he said, wrapping his arms around her again. "I didn't have time for anything else."

_Damn,_ she thought. _Damn_. And she had thought a couple of years had been bad. "So you really did wait a bloody long time," she marveled.

"Yes," he admitted. "But when I said that earlier, Emma, I was only talking about the time that I have waited for _you_. Three hundred years of revenge-fueled celibacy was nothing, love. Waiting the past five months to win your affections and your trust on the uncertain hope of winning you was an eternity."

"'Uncertain'?" she echoed. "What happened to, 'And I will win it?'"

"Winning your heart was never the question, love. Convincing you to let me in _was_."

"I thought pirates were great at climbing walls," she shot back at him with a playful poke to his ribs.

"Some walls you simply don't scale without permission," he said thoughtfully. "It's bad form."

"Well, you had pretty good form tonight for a pirate that hasn't had a woman in three hundred years," she teased.

"'Pretty good'?" he exploded, struggling to sit up. "I'll show you damned _excellent_ good form," he threatened with a growl, reaching for her.

"Well, I certainly can't object to that," she murmured, letting herself be cradled in his arms again.

Their second tryst was nearly everything that their first had not been: frantic instead of slow, passionate instead of romantic, rousing instead of tender... Eventually, Emma lost track of the number of times she climaxed, and simply gave herself over to the dance, reveling in the sensations they awakened in each other. When Killian finally spent his last, she slid off of him in a heap, her chest heaving, and lay motionless on the bed. She honestly wasn't certain she would ever be able to move again, but God, she wanted to, if it meant she could have more of _that_.

"Admit it, love," he said between his own ragged breaths, "that was much better form than any of the other lads you've had."

Damn him, he was right. The smug bastard. But she would die rather than admit it to him and inflate his ego all the more. So she huffed, "That _was_ excellent form," hoping the ambiguity would be enough to simultaneously satisfy his ego and save her pride.

He scooted closer to her, throwing one arm over her hip. She peered at him as they lay on their sides, facing each other. His blue eyes returned the gaze. Neither of them said a word, but they communicated just the same, their hearts speaking the words neither of them was prepared to utter yet.

"Emma, love," he said after a while, "how did you know about my hand? I never told you I lost it defending Milah."

"No," she agreed.

"Then how?"

She inhaled deeply. "Neal," she admitted after some hesitation.

"Baelfire?" he wondered, quite forgetting the other man's preferred form of address as he puzzled over it. "Why would he do that?"

She sighed. "I think...he thought that if he told me the circumstances, all the...details of your past with his mother and him and his father, that I would become angry; reject you." She paused, thinking back to the conversation with sadness and a twinge of disgust. "But it backfired on him. It was, as you say, bad form to do that." She swallowed with difficulty. "And all right, the circumstances of your relationship with Milah were wrong, considering that you took up with his married mother, but...you fought for her. You didn't-you didn't leave her when things were hard, when someone tried to talk you out of being with her."

He peered down at her with understanding in his blue eyes. "Like he did you."

"Yes," she whispered.

They talked of small things, then, neither of them wanting to yet face the fact that although they both knew he would never abandon her, never walk away from what they had together without a fight, he would have to leave her house eventually. They talked for so long in their mutual need to maintain the new intimacy that had blossomed between them that they did eventually fall asleep in each other's arms, quite unaware.

When Emma stirred the next morning, she cuddled further into the comfortable warmth that surrounded her, refusing to open her eyes so early on her day off. She had had the most arousing and wonderful dream about Killian, and she didn't want to let go of it.

_Killian?_ She wondered suddenly. That wasn't right. Never, not once, had she called him anything but his moniker, Hook, in her dreams. Her eyes flew open and she sat up, rousing the pirate that lay in bed next to her. Memories of the night before flooded back, and she felt her cheeks grow hot. _God, it really happened after all this time? _It must have, she realized, because her dreams had been much tamer than the reality.

"Morning, love," he murmured, cracking his eyes open to watch her. "Slept well, I gather?" he teased with a sleepy smile.

"Uh, yeah," she managed awkwardly, gathering the bedspread over her breasts to cover herself.

Killian reached over with his good arm and tugged the blanket free. "Shame to ruin such a vision," he explained in a silky tone.

"Whoa, buddy," she said, glancing at the clock, which read 6:03am, "don't you have to be at work in about two hours?"

"Mmm," he said, inching closer to her, "I don't need two hours to get ready." He sat up and kissed her, nibbling at her lower lip as he tried to coax her into one more tryst.

"But," she said, pushing him away gently, "you do have to walk all the way home, take a shower, and put on some fresh clothes. Ones that are appropriate for work."

He sighed, looking disappointed. "Granny's isn't that far away, Emma," he pointed out. "It won't take me more than twenty minutes to walk there, and even less than that to shower and dress."

"You're sure?" she said skeptically.

His expression brightened. "Of course." He slid his arms around her waist. "Now," he said in a suggestive tone, "about breakfast..."

Breakfast? Emma thought with surprise as her stomach growled in response to the suggestion. Had they really spent all night together and forgotten to eat a single thing?

"Killian," she tried again, melting a little with each stroke of his hand upon her hip, "we didn't eat a thing last night. Aren't you starving?"

"Ravenous, darling," he replied in a tone that made it clear her concerns hadn't fully penetrated his sex-fogged mind.

"I meant," she emphasized weakly as he trailed kisses up the length of her arm, tarrying at the sensitive spot that was her inner elbow. She clutched the sheet, bracing herself at the sensation it aroused. _How the hell did he just do that?_ she wondered. "I meant," she tried again, with much less conviction than before, "that you should eat something."

"I intend to, love," he purred in her ear.

"At the diner!" she practically shouted, "I meant that you should go back now and have time to eat something at the diner!"

He paused then, gazing into her eyes. "Is that what you want?"

"N-no," she admitted with a sheepish smile. "But I don't want you to go hungry."

"A man is always hungry with you around, darling," he breathed, resuming his attentions. "Food can wait."

_Hard to argue with that_, she thought with a goofy smile as he nibbled at her ear. She gave up trying to convince him and simply gave in to their mutual desire as they rolled around the bed, seeking to satisfy their need for each other. It was neither hurried nor slow, but both tender and passionate, and utterly soul-shattering.

Neither of them lingered in bed afterward, but dressed with mild haste. Emma followed him down the hall, taking a slight detour on the way to the front door. "Hey, yard boy," she said, tossing him an apple from the bag that sat on her kitchen counter. He caught it with his good arm. "Come by next week and do my lawn."

"So long?" he arched a brow.

"I meant my actual lawn," she clarified.

He nodded once, disappointment in his eyes as he tucked the apple into his pocket, turning away. "If you desire."

"But-" she swallowed, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear, stepping toward him, "-I'm free for dinner this weekend." She smiled shyly, kissing him full on the mouth. "And...dessert afterward."

A slow grin spread across his face. "As you wish, darling. Far be it from me to deprive a lady of a good dessert."

** A/N: Tell me what you think! There's an idea for a sequel brewing, if people are interested, so please let me know.**


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